Why are the user names shown in the order book?

We assign a random name for every single account. The name looks like something like this: Rhino_899009

So, instead of publishing the actual name of the user, we are publishing a random name.

This protects the user’s privacy as long as he doesn’t reveal the link between his real name and the randomly generated name. It is the user’s responsibility to protect his own privacy.

Why are we not hiding all the information, including the random name?

There are a lot of reasons behind this. I will name the most important:

1 - This avoids market manipulations, like FrontRunning, PumpAndDump, and other manipulations. You can try, but people would catch you instantly and would not follow the manipulators. Essentially, the market manipulators would lose their money because people would be able to catch the manipulation very easily.

2 - Help to build reputation, remember, in case of a government BAN on bitcoins, we will turn the exchange into a P2P market, therefore, reputation will be extremely important.

3 - It allows users to audit the “exchange operator”. This will help the exchange to prove its solvency to the public without a need of an auditor who can be easily bought.

I understand that most of the exchanges today don’t publish this, that is why we see a lot of market manipulations out there, and also a lot of scammers who just want to rob bitcoins from their customers (I am not talking about the big exchanges, I am talking about a lot of small bitcoin exchanges that already closed their doors because they claimed they were hacked)